I decided to start this page to kind of accompany the what’s new page… except that page deals with new stuff on the site, while this page will give some brief updates about what’s been going on with me. Not terribly interesting, I admit, but people want to know these things, for whatever reason.

Right now, though, I’m too tired to bother doing much of an update… here’s now in a nutshell: 1 1/2 weeks of class left, less than 4 weeks to graduation, a month and a half until I leave for Vietnam, and three brain cells until mental destruction.

I had a section on my site for a while before this titled “what’s new sitewide,” which just acted as a changelog for the site itself. But this post was the start of a reverse chronological section I initially titled “what’s new lazewide” (I think) which eventually became “what’s up with laze.” Almost two years after my first blog post, I played around with pitas for a couple of months. On July 19, 2000, I launched twist of fait accomplis, the blog you’re reading now. I eventually rolled all the old content into twist of fait.

In “Save the Drama for Your Mama” I wrote about how horrible the local FOX affiliate news was at the time, but it blew up because of a discussion in the comments about the time the weatherman, who was dating a reporter, allegedly cheated on her with another reporter at the same station. Oops. (Also, people have opinions about weather forecasters.)

Another popular post continues to be my interview with Phyllis Wilcox from 2002. Who is she? A woman who was very close with one of America’s most notorious serial killers, Henry Lee Lucas.

My post about Erika Sifrit, a former student at my alma mater that was thrown in jail for murder, continues to get visitors. I have an unapproved comment on that post sitting in WordPress that starts, “I was also in [prison] with Erika let me tell you she was a piece of fucking Shit.”

The blog was never huge, but it’s had its moments. The most important thing is that between it and the Ping, the blog captured the things I was reading, thinking, and doing for a long stretch of my early adult life.

These days I’m not writing in my blog as frequently. A few times a year. But not a month goes by where I don’t think, “You know, I should post to my blog again.” And since I’ve cut my Facebook usage about 95% since the beginning of the year, maybe I will finally do it.

After I finally catch up on my year-in-review posts going back to 2016…

1.
A woman overvoted on her ballot (meaning that she’d filled in two circles on a race where she should have only filled in one), so I explained to her that she needed to spoil her ballot by filling in all of the circles and then I’d provide her a new one. She spoke and understood some English, but struggled understanding what I wanted her to do. “Does anyone here speak Spanish?” she asked me. I looked around and didn’t think so, so I pulled out my phone and fired up Google Translate. It worked perfectly. +1 technology.

2.
Aside from a couple of “you let all the illegal aliens vote!” conspiracy theorists, the voters were all very civil throughout the day. The big exception, however, was the final person I interacted with that day. He showed up to vote 15 minutes before polls closed, but he was on the books as being in a different district. He was sure he was supposed to vote here because he’d moved and had a new license so obviously he’s supposed to be able to vote here. He insisted he checked the box on the DMV form to update his voter registration, but my records showed that no update had been received. I called the registrar to do some further checking when it came out that he’d only changed his address a week ago (all changes needed to be done by October 16th). I explained that he wouldn’t be able to vote in our precinct because he’d missed the deadline by two weeks. He was livid. He yelled in my face that I was not letting him vote and I was telling him that his vote wouldn’t be counted. His volume increased and people started looking over. My poll workers watched in horror. He tried to embarrass and bully me into letting him cast a ballot. It didn’t work. He left as the polls were closing screaming about how he was going to tell people about this and make it public.

(No matter how angry you get at the polls, please remember that the workers there are not full-time employees. They work once or twice a year for minimum wage as a service to the community. Chill out and take it up with the registrar.)

3.
A woman brought her elderly father in to vote. He used one of those walkers that has a seat attached to it. He moved slowly through the polling place, insisting that he would stand while he filled out his ballot. He gave chocolates to each poll worker he interacted with. He cast his ballot. On the way out, his daughter told us it was the first time he’d been out of bed all week but he was adamant about voting in person.

The woman came back in a few minutes later with her mother. She used the same walker and similarly moved slowly through the polling place. She stood, she cast her vote. As she was walking out, her daughter came over again and said, “I just wanted you all to know this… my parents have been married 66 years and found out within 48 hours of each other that they have stage 4 cancer. But they insisted on coming out to vote today.”

So, to anyone too lazy to vote or who think that their vote doesn’t count so they’re not going to bother: you can do better. No excuses.

During a trip to Las Vegas last week, we made a trip to Nelson, NV, a former mining town with a lot of… stuff. Lots of old barns, rusting vehicles, and even left over props from movie shoots.

One of the items that caught my eye was a beat-up jukebox in one of the barns.

It took me about 3 seconds to realize I needed to make a playlist of the songs on the jukebox. So I took photos of each section to make sure I could read which songs were included and when I got home, I put together the playlist. It’s only missing a couple of the tracks:

I think the newest tracks on there were Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” and a few Prince tracks from around the same era (1983 or so). So, I’m guessing this thing has been sitting unused for at least 33 or 34 years. There’s some good variety in the list. My only complaint? Way too much Bob Seger.

Joseph Gervasi, who I met through Exhumed Films 16 or 17 years ago, recently did a short introduction to a double feature of Killer Klowns from Outer Space and Deadly Spawn. The show was a benefit for James Harris of docterror.com and the Horror Sexy podcast, who is battling Ewings Sarcoma.

It’s not what I would have expected to come from introducing such a double feature. You should watch. It’s really good.

It’s easy to malign or laugh at small subcultures or communities that form around niche interests (here, fans of horror and cult films). It’s easy to dismiss them as wastes of time. But in almost every case, these groups are so much more than collections of people with a common interest. They’re groups that can support and lift up members during times of need.

Additionally, he speaks on the importance of hope and generosity:

Cynicism, I think, is the worst possible attribute that anyone can have. It makes you into an extremely boring person, a very ineffective person, and someone who is in no way artistic or creative.

Like most other folks I know, I’m ready to flip the bird to 2016 and move on. In April, I officially shuttered my tea shop, which was a tad depressing. It was a rough summer with kidney stones that never seemed to leave. September was about as eventful as could be. And we closed out the year on a somewhat stressful and less than healthful note. But there was a lot of good stuff, too. Made some big time breakthroughs on the family tree and connected with a lot of new family, did a lot of running, had a great anniversary trip with Huyen, and enjoyed some really fun times with our kids and dogs.

Thanks to thin walls, I hear an older gentleman getting a hernia check followed by a prostate exam

The kids and I fight various stages of walking pneumonia

More visits to the doctor and imaging centers than I’ve ever had in one month

RIP

Based solely on the folks I RIP’ed on Twitter (or FB). People (and “people”) I knew personally in bold. Dates are when I tweeted/posted to FB, not the actual death date. Lots of commonly-eulogized folks omitted.

1/10: Mitsu Suzuki

1/18: Iron Mike Sharpe

1/27: Angus Scrimm

3/8: Mr. Edwards (2 months late)

6/22: John Reynolds

7/20: Rose Dooley

8/16: Bobby Hutcherson

10/26: Bob Browne (three months late)

11/8: America

11/18: Sharon Jones

12/29: Mini-Moo

12/31: Huston Smith

Books I Finished Reading

Listed in order finished.

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

Essays After Eighty by Donald Hall

Preserving Your Family’s Oral History and Stories by Thomas MacEntee

Sky Above, Great Wind: The Life and Poetry of Zen Master Ryokan by Kazuaki Tanahashi

Finding Samuel Lowe: China, Jamaica, Harlem by Paula Williams Madison

Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz

Don’t Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dōgen, Japan’s Greatest Zen Master by Brad Warner

(So, um, yeah. I’m a little late with this. I never quite finished it up last year, but I need to get it out there before this year’s end-of-year wrap-up sneaks up on me. I never quite finished all my commentary, but I figured it was time to just post it and I’ll fill it in later… someday.)

Since 2007, I’ve posted a year-end music wrap up that serves mainly as a reference for myself and a few other folks that like to see what I enjoyed (I wish more friends would do the same). I try to stick to new music, no re-releases. Here is this year’s.

Everything’s sorted in alphabetical order. (Note: My general rule of thumb is to try and link to the album at the location the artist will get the most money (Bandcamp, their label’s site), but there are still a few Amazon mp3 store links in there (and they’re affiliate links).

Best of 2015

Abstract Rude: Keep the Feel: A Legacy of Hip-Hop Soul
Solid grown-ass man hip-hop. “The Solution” with Brother Ali and Slug is excellent, as is “I Lived in a Time.” There are several massive posse cuts, large enough to be well beyond what you normally see in 2015.

Barrington Levy: Acousticalevy
Barrington sounds as good as he ever has, his voice indistinguishable from his prime in the 70s and 80s. Occasionally the songs go a touch long and of course I cringed hearing autotune on “Times Hard” and “Only You” but otherwise: what an album. Deserved the Grammy nomination it received. (And thankfully, he seems to be on the mend after contracting Dengue Fever midway through the year.)

Ibeyi: Ibeyi
An early-year contender for album of the year, the French-Cuban musical twin sisters create a ghostly masterpiece of minimalist soul. Beautiful.

Josa Peit: Constellation EP
One of my favorite vocalists dropped this abstract gem of an EP this year. Hoping she’s at work on a full-length LP for 2016.

Kamasi Washington: The Epic
The appropriately titled hours-long jazz project that goes from spiritual to free to funky and sounds solid no matter the subgenre. I love that music like this is still being made.

Sadat X: Never Left
Out of all the emcees that have been around since the 80s, Sadat’s got to be one of the most continually active of them. He does guest spots everywhere and still drops frequent solo albums. Never Left was an early year dose of classic hip-hop from one of the best and most distinctively unique voices hip-hop’s known. Super solid pairings with the UMC’s (both of them!!) and Dres from Black Sheep.

Scarface: Deeply Rooted
30 years into the game and Face still puts out some of the most engaging solo albums out there. A solid listen from start to finish with no filler.

Other Stats

I’m a big believer in preservation. Why else would I bother digitizing and cataloging old cassettes few people care about or a radio show from the 1990s? Obviously, cultural preservation is important to me. Similarly, I think institutional preservation is in companies’, non-profits’, and schools’ best interests so that they have an accurate, complete, and accessible archive available.

But, perhaps more important than any of these is personal preservation.

Personal preservation isn’t about backing things up (wait–you are backing things up, right? Oh, next month when you’ve got some free time? No. NOW. To a hard drive, to the cloud, and maybe to a second cloud or hard drive that you keep at someone else’s house). Personal preservation is about saving what you create, capturing your thoughts for the future, documenting your legacy. It sounds like something only a philosopher or politician might need to bother with, but let me tell you: I’d give anything to read my great-great grandmother’s 1800s equivalent of a Facebook update, even if it was just about how she was “feeling annoyed” because washing machines hadn’t been invented yet.

We have a tough time, in the present, foreseeing what we or someone else might find interesting or useful in the future. We may think we have a grasp on it and trust ourselves to filter things out in real time, but as far as I’m concerned, if it’s something you deem worthy of posting to Twitter today, it’s worth hanging onto for the future. Even if it serves no purpose other than rounding out a more complete picture of who you were during 2016’s presidential election, that’s enough.

Here’s what you can do right now to get started…

Set up a folder on your computer somewhere called “Backups – social media.” Make sure it’s one that gets backed up (see above). Bonus points if it exists in a Dropbox/OneDrive folder and is backed up to something like Crashplan or Backblaze.

Under that folder, create one folder for each of your social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram).

Periodically download backups for each of those services and store them here. Make sure the filename you save includes your name, the name of the service, and the export date in YYYY-MM-DD format (ie. facebook-ryan_macmichael-20160929.xml). Bonus points for doing this on a schedule (monthly or quarterly should be plenty).

How do you download backups for different services? (Feel free to request others and I’ll add them here.)

Google: Google Takeout lets you download your entire Google life (including things like Blogger and YouTube) or select parts of it from one spot. Be forewarned that your backup could be pretty huge if you include your Google Photos.

What should you do with all this stuff? Just hang onto it. Maybe occasionally peek at it to see what’s there. Make something from it… think a yearbook of your Facebook posts or Instagram photos. Having a physical object of something digital isn’t a bad idea, really. Or, if you’re looking for an ambitious coding project, make a compiled timeline view of the data.

The main thing, though, is to make sure people know where it is. If something happens to you, make sure there are some people that can get to it and that they’ll care for it. This can be informal or you could spell it out in your will (or, more likely, a letter of instruction referenced in your will).

Not convinced? Remember this:

No one else is going to preserve you for you.

Sure, the Internet Archive will grab blog posts and assorted tweet archives exist, but what if your Twitter account is private? What about Facebook? What about services that exist only as (or primarily as) mobile apps? You need to take responsibility. Be your own archivist.

While I’ve been pretty slack posting here over the last few years, but I feel like I’ve been even more neglectful of my long-time home on the web than usual. Partially, that’s because I find myself sharing less personal stuff publicly… but that’s not really an excuse. There’s plenty more to talk about.

I’ve got a handful of posts that have been sitting in partially-finished draft mode for months and I’ve continued to make a lot of quiet work on sideprojects. There are some new projects in the works and lots of ideas kicking around. Same as always, really.

Anyway, just wanted to say hi and say things are good. If you happen to spot this in your RSS reader (what now?) or by accident when googling me, take a sec to say hi in the comments. In the meantime, a picture from our recent 15th anniversary trip to St. Thomas.

Back in 1984, I got my first blank tape. I don’t remember if someone gave it to me, if my parents bought it for me, or if I saved my own money to get it. It had a very distinctive smell to it (which lingers ever so slightly to this day) and ended up becoming the first tape where I recorded my favorite songs off of the radio and record (by holding my boombox up to my turntable’s speaker). This is the tape, a relatively unassuming Certron 90 minute cassette, scrawled with my horrible handwriting:

For fun, I decided to throw together a Spotify playlist of all the tracks on the tape. I wasn’t able to include the “Michael Martian” version of “Thriller” (Michael Martian was an alien version of Michael Jackson that I drew, represented aurally by a 33 1/3 RPM record being played at 45 speed), which came after “The Stroke” on side B. I also wasn’t able to close out the mix with The Chipmunks’ version of “The Longest Time,” so I opted for Billy Joel’s original instead.

2015 was a year of preservation, of family history and otherwise. It was a year with its fair share of loss. It was a year where life moved forward, progress was made on some things but not on others, and the kids continued to grow. I turned 40. I saw lots of family and friends. I read more books, watched fewer movies, scanned lots of photos and slides, digitized hours of videos, and made absolutely no new music.

And now, the year past, with cold lists and numbers with a few photos and colorful graphs thrown in.

Found my long lost copy of a Hall & Oates bio from the 1980s. Realized it’s going for $90+ on Amazon!

Started the archiving process of ripping on VHS tapes

Huyen’s mom in town for her annual month-long visit

Watched BIL and SIL do their first triathlon in Wildwood, NJ. Met up with childhood friend Lisa, who I hadn’t seen in 28 years (!) and her parents Alex and Mary (who I’d seen a little more recently). Also caught up again with Randy Senna (from the Daily Ping Fascination post and Hoarders).

September

Dad turns 70!

Hit with a bogus $160 at Verizon Wireless in NY and an attempted $3200 charge for xray equipment. Result: yet another replacement credit card.

Learn more about the nuts and bolts of digital preservation (and digital preservation of analog content). I’m going to say done, but this is something ongoing so I’ll be continuing to do so.

Play and finish “A Mind Forever Voyaging.” Finally grabbed the game and an emulator to run it on (that will let me save my game) at the end of the year.

Read up on the story behind (and impact of) the Attica prison riots of 1970. Read A Time to Die and really enjoyed it. Learned a lot and much of it absolutely still applies.

Finally launch my protected family history site for my family (with audio, stories, etc.) Done, and ended up redoing it partway through the year and adding a ton of functionality beyond what I’d initially planned.

Figure out the mystery behind my great-grandparents’ life and trip to the US. Did not finish, but not for a lack of trying! I learned quite a bit through my research, but have yet to confirm the details surrounding my great-grandmother’s death (no death certificate to be found!) or much more about their life in Lithuania. This will likely end up taking a few more years.

Run 1000 miles in 2015 So frustratingly close… if I had an extra week I could have done it (I hit 970). I blame the three weeks I was out of commission due to a sprained ankle, but truly, if I’d just been a little less lazy in April and May, I could have easily knocked this out.

Books I Finished Reading

Listed in order finished.

Ballistics: Poems by Billy Collins

The Wolf’s Hour by Robert R. McCammon

Kakurenbo: Or the Whereabouts of Zen Priest Ryokan by Eido Frances Carney

Kangaroo Notebook by Kobo Abe

The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami

Early Recollections and Life of Dr. James Still by James Still

“Don’t tell white folks” : or light out of darkness by James T. Still (pamphlet)

Will Travel for Vegan Food: A Young Woman’s Solo Van-Dwelling Mission to Break Free, Find Food, and Make Love by Kristin Lajeunesse

Myself When I Am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus by Gene Santoro

The Seventh Day by Yua Hu

Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio by Jessica Abel

A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator’s Rise to Power by Paul Fischer

A Time to Die: The Attica Prison Revolt by Tom Wicker

The Way of Tenderness: Awakening Through Race, Sexuality and Gender by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman